SEASON 2 - EPISODE 119 - AUGUST 21, 2024

Using AI for Writing, Being Facebook Free, and other Listener Questions

In this episode, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals, return from a summer hiatus to answer a new set of listener questions. They dive into topics like the role of AI in writing and their updated thoughts on staying Facebook-free. REWORK host, Kimberly Rhodes also gets in a question of her own.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:38 - The importance of using your own voice in writing rather than relying on AI
05:50 - How targeted advertising can be beneficial for some but not for everyone
08:50 - One disagreement with a company or person shouldn’t lead to complete condemnation
19:28 - David shares his reflections on taking a summer break from X (formerly Twitter)

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It’s been a couple weeks since we’ve been with you. We were taking a little bit of a summer hiatus, but we are back. I thought we’d ease back into this whole podcasting thing by doing some listener questions. So guys, let’s jump right in. The first question comes from Chris and he wrote, “Given the value you place on writing skills, what are your thoughts on using AI to help do it?” Jason, you want to get us started on that?

Jason (00:37): I think maybe AI can help edit things, but I don’t think you should be using it to write things is my personal feeling, just given the fact that at least here we want to hear what people have to say. I am not really interested in what a computer has to say about what it thinks you have to say, I want to hear what you have to say, and I think that’s you writing, just like I wouldn’t want to talk or hear from a fake version of you verbally. Why would we want to read a fake version of you on the screen? That said, I’ve written some things and I’ve thrown it through a paragraph or even an essay through ChatGPT and just picked up a couple things and had some suggestions on how to phrase things. I think that’s as if you’re asking someone else what do you think? But I think you got to start yourself. That’s my general vibe on this.

Kimberly (01:26): I was just going to say, I use ChatGPT almost like I would a thesaurus, when I’m like, “I need another word for” is kind of my use case for it.

Jason (01:34): Yeah

David (01:35): I’ve used it for that in programming as well. A lot of programming is writing and finding just the right word for the object or even a project. I’ve used it for that as well, but as Jason say, when you use it to write an entire essay or application as it were, you get into trouble real quick. And we actually just saw that, we just did a open call for programmers a while back and we had I think over 2000 applications. And it’s really when you see the mass that the trouble comes in because we received a fair number of applicants who had clearly used AI to write their cover letter, and unfortunately for them it was the same AI output for most of them. So it read the same way. It was using the same phrases. Now they didn’t know that. They perhaps just went through ChatGPT or whatever and as, hey, write a cover letter for applying at a job at 37signals, but what we saw were just duplicates, and that’s obviously instantly disqualifying.

(02:40): We’re not going to consider someone who is not going to write in their own words an application to a job that we have opened, especially when we get five, 10 or I don’t know what the high count was on these applicants, but I saw a couple of them that were exactly the same. And that is one of those dangers that I think you don’t necessarily realize when you’re using the system. You’re asking it to do something. Well, if someone else asks the same system to write something similar, they’re going to get a similar output and the person who’s receiving it is going to tell. I think this is one of the reasons I really like the word slob, which is this term that’s come in for AI generated content that it’s just slob. It’s just something that gets shoveled because it’s very easy to produce and it’s often not that nutritious.

(03:29): I’ve at least found, and maybe this is survivorship bias or call out that the kind of AI writing that I’ve received, it still smells like AI writing. Maybe that’s just six months away from being imperceptible that you can’t tell and who knows where we’re then. But right now at least you can still tell It still has the slob smell, it still has the slob look and yeah, no, that doesn’t work. And again, if you’re using it as a author, if you’re using it as editorial suggestions, great, but if you don’t have something original to say, why are you writing in the first place? Who are you sharing this with? If I wanted to have a conversation with a computer, I could just do that on my own. Why are you even in the picture then? I don’t think it’s a path that’s going to pan.

Kimberly (04:20): Okay, speaking of AI, did you guys hear about that commercial that Google pulled? The helped me write Sydney a letter? It was around the Olympics.

David (04:29): That was exactly the same thing, right? That was this sense of authenticity that if you’re asking a computer to write something on your behalf, well, it’s obviously not you writing it and it’s really not even about the computer, it’s about it’s not you. It’s just the same as if I’d asked Jason, hey, can you write what some note to someone for me? Okay, well that’s not for me anymore. And I think as humans we’re quite quick and suspicious to pick up on that connection that something is inauthentic. You didn’t write this. It’s not really whether it’s AI or not, it’s the fact that you did not write this.

Kimberly (05:07): Well, the worst part was that it was a dad saying, Google help my daughter write this letter, which was just like, dad, why don’t you help your daughter write that letter? I watched it and was like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. And then they pulled it shortly after, which I thought was interesting. So AI still a topic of discussion. Okay, we’re going to jump to a question that came on YouTube from Brad. It is a marketing related question for us, which is “Question, what changed the company’s mind about Instagram? I see 37signals has an Instagram, but traditionally Basecamp is ’Facebook free.’ Genuine question.” Before we get, maybe we should start with the Facebook free. I don’t know that many people even know what the stance was about that.

David (05:50): Yeah, so Facebook free came about I think 2018, ’17, where as a reaction, the fact that we have never liked to put it mildly targeted advertisement, and targeted advertisement is sort of where instead of placing advertisement in an outlet where you’re like, oh, I’m advertising to golfers, I’m going to put an ad in a golf magazine, you find golfers wherever they are because Google or Facebook or someone else has gleaned that information about them and then even when they’re on something unrelated, you’re going to get ads for it. In particular, I don’t know if Jason feels quite as strong as I do, but I in particular have always found that just like I’ve really unbecoming way, I’ve found it as a gross violation of my own personal privacy and of people on the internet in general. I think it’s allowed a lot of content on the internet that could never have been commercially viable to suddenly be commercially viable because it no longer mattered what the content was.

(06:54): It only mattered whether you could attract the eyeballs. And in that realm Facebook along with Google to some extent, but Facebook really was the face of being the worst of that. And we just thought, do you know what? We don’t like these targeted advertisements as they are. We don’t like what Facebook is doing around this. We shouldn’t be spending our money on this. Now I think what’s interesting what has happened since then, I don’t know if I’ve softened my opinion on targeted advertisement in general. I actually still think it would be great if that was just outlawed as some cities have done, for example with advertising in the public space. I think there’s a city in Brazil, there’s a couple cities in Europe where you can no longer have billboards of advertisement.

Jason (07:44): Vermont has that by the way, and it’s state level. There are no…

David (07:47): Which one?

Jason (07:48): Vermont I believe has no billboards has that…

David (07:49): I didn’t know that.

Jason (07:50): No billboards on the roads period.

David (07:52): Amazing. It’s nice, amazing. Anyone who’s ever gone to a city or I think probably a highway that doesn’t have that will realize, oh, this is better. This is nicer. Not having your senses constantly assaulted in this way. Now that doesn’t mean that all advertisement is bad, and I think this gets to the real point of this issue. Is Facebook really particularly bad here? I think I used to believe so. I’m much less sure now, much less sure that Facebook is some unique evil in this regard. I think there’s a real issue still with targeted advertisement. I think we should probably update our stance on that. I don’t think today I would not take the stance of calling out Facebook in particular with this and say like, well, we’re not going to do business with Facebook. We don’t want to do this kind of business at all. We don’t do targeted advertisement, we don’t have an interest in it, but calling out Facebook as some unique evil in this regard, I think now that was misplaced.

Jason (08:51): I would also add that there’s something that aesthetically bugs me about dismissing an entire company or something because of one thing they do that we don’t like or something like that. There’s something, I feel like that was a, it’s sort of a thing people used to do a bit more, and I think we’ve maybe softened on that a bit here. It’s like, let’s just not call out everybody who does something that we don’t like and then be like, we will not do work business with them. I mean it’s one thing if they’re particularly egregious or there are probably lines we can draw there, but I don’t necessarily think that this is a line so much anymore. That’s my general feeling on it kind of lighten up a little bit. That’s their business model. They’re trying to make it work that’s obviously working well for them.

(09:41): Instagram’s a great product actually in all the fundamentals. I don’t use Facebook, Facebook itself, but Instagram’s quite a good product, although it’s of course been overtaken by ads and it has its own issues, but at its core it’s good. It’s kind of fun actually. So I dunno, I feel like hating less is a good idea in general here, especially at the corporate level. There’s plenty of things people don’t have to like about us and to write us off completely because we said one thing or we do one thing. I would feel like that’s a loss too. So I don’t think we should do that on the other side. Again, there are exceptions I’m sure, but I don’t think this is one of them anymore.

David (10:17): Yeah, I think as a general stance on this, we’ve lightened up and I think I wish that was a general sense that we would all do, and to me at least the last, let’s say four-ish years have really been instructive in that regard. How stark do all the lines have to be? The thicker we draw them, the more we’re boxed in. And you know what? I’ve really become less enthused by that. And it goes not just to the Facebook question, it goes to a lot of different ways. I used to use Twitter in a substantially different way than I used Twitter today, and a lot of it was more on an aggressive tone with other companies or individuals in a sort of antagonistic way. I think it’s fair to characterize it. Is there a place for that that someone’s calling that? Yeah, there probably is.

(11:08): Do we need to carry as much of it as we used to do? No. Do you know what? Maybe this something is also by just getting old. Then you’re like, all right, fuck it, I’m 45 now. I don’t have the time for this shit anymore. But I think also some of it is zooming out and go, do you know what you can always rationalize, almost always rationalize, in the moment the particular thing you’re so just offended about or so passionately in a position to… And okay, yeah, maybe, but you add all of it up from everyone all the time and you go like, no. Do you know what my contribution to that overall temperature being as high as it is, I don’t want that in there now, pulling our five drops out of that ocean, is that going to make a difference? No, but neither was it the other way around.

(12:00): So if you’re going to recognize something, pull back just on your own behavior, be a little less harshly drawn in those regards, be a little more just like, okay, do you know what we’re not going to do targeted advertisement. Does that mean that we have to get on the barricades with one particular company like Facebook about this? No. So I think it is a product of its time and that time has passed certainly for us and I think also for more people, at least in some circles in some regard. I think overall in tech we’ve been moving away from some of those stances and I think that’s really healthy and I’m happy to see it and we should actually do a more formal sort of, I don’t know if it’s a retraction as much as it’s just like, you know what? This shouldn’t be one of the tent poles that we have. Let’s pull that tent pole out of the ground, chug it somewhere in the bin, and then stand for something slightly more positive.

Jason (12:58): It’s similar to people. I don’t write anybody off ’casue there’s something I don’t like about them. That’s not how I am. Many people are. I don’t like one thing and that person is absolute garbage. I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live or move through this life that we have and the time that we have. So it’s similar. So we don’t like this company’s business model. They’re not the worst thing that ever happened to the world because of that.

David (13:22): Let me even double down on that. Not only is it not the worst thing I have, and again, it doesn’t invalidate the fact that I don’t like targeted advertising. I can not like targeted advertisement and also appreciate that there are companies and products and whatever that have benefited from it. And I think maybe this is where I’ve gotten enlightened about this is Toby at Shopify helped me see that a little better. I mean he’s at the forefront of this. He hosts literally millions of shops of small independent makers and a lot of them live and die to some extent by this targeted advertisement or at least by advertisement through Instagram. Can we imagine in another world where that didn’t exist and they were still able to, yeah, we probably can, but that’s not the world they live in right now, right? So being able to maintain and hold to, if not contradictory idea, at least two ideas that are intention.

(14:12): I don’t like targeted advertising. I think the internet would be better without it. Also, there are all these shops that are using it and prospering from it. And you know what? Maybe that’s also good. I think to Jason’s point also about not defining someone or something just by that one thing, I’ve seen a lot of things from Facebook. I actually really like. Their work currently on open sourcing AI models is absolutely incredible. The Llama three releases and what they’re doing to prevent AI from getting locked up inside of either open AI or Google or something, absolutely incredible. We just talked about AI. One of the things I’m most excited about in AI is the open source models. And not only is Facebook Meta open sourcing these models, they’re underwriting this enormous cost to produce it. They’re literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these models and then they’re just going, here you go.

(15:14): Have fun. Find out. I’ve been playing with these models myself, the llama three model, and I’ve been really impressed how good it is. I’m running essentially chat GPT on my own machine. It’s pretty fast. It’s very accurate. Wonderful. Would I have guessed that in 2018 then that was the way it was going to spend? No. Which is also what’s so I think humbling. Perhaps not only can you perhaps not like someone, whether you like someone or not, is a moment in time. They might reveal themselves to be a very different person or company or take a different stand that you suddenly like either five minutes from now or two years from now, do you know what? If you have a little less rigidity about who you’d like and who you don’t like or at least some flexibility in being able to morph that, I think you open yourself to the possibility of learning something new.

(16:04): And I’ve certainly learned a lot of new things about Facebook Meta that I really like. There’s still some of the old stuff I don’t really like, but so what I think almost anyone on the internet would say the same about Jason or I, would say the same thing about Basecamp or 37signals. Oh, I really liked what they said about the cloud exit, but I hate what they say about targeted advertisement or whatever. Okay, good, great. Let’s not all be clones of each other with exactly the same opinions on everything. Let’s have different opinions. Let’s have different companies that lean in different directions and try different things. And do you know what in the end, the market usually if it gets to work, and this is where there’s an whole antitrust thing, but if it gets to work, sorts it out. Great. Good.

Jason (16:48): The other thing I would add is just, this is maybe a personal growth thing, but for me perhaps, but I can’t even say I or dislike somebody. It’s more like I don’t like that part of them or I like this part of them. People are very complicated and what I see a lot of people doing is completely dismissing somebody they don’t like one part of them and then transferring that to the rest of them and they miss out because people are interesting and complicated and contradictions, living contradictions, we all are. So just look, if you’re going to look at some, I don’t like that little thing about them. There’s a lot left. There’s a lot left of them. And I think it’s just a healthier way to go through life. Again, maybe it’s an aging thing, but I’ve come to believe that fully.

David (17:29): I think Zuckerberg is a great example of that. Again, as with many public figures, I used to have quite the cardboard cutout of whoever I thought that individual was. Very interesting individual. I mean a lot of folks at that level who’ve achieved the kind of things that he’s achieved are bound to be interesting people because it’s a rare combination of factors that leads to that, right? And I think his own personal different ways of being have been unfolding from the archetype of the Android giving testimony before Congress to now this ’fro chain wearing MMA loving individual on a freaking surfboard with an American flag. And just like, I love this episode of reality. That’s so fascinating. It’s just fun to see that, right? And I think again, the levity is part of this. If you are and you can’t appreciate the levity and I get the best show on Earth is reality and it’s been putting out some banger seasons, especially in tech right now. I mean you’ve got Zuckerberg on the one side. I feel the same thing about the other perhaps whatever controversial figure, Elon Musk. I used to be very critical of basically everything that Elon did and then got a growing appreciation for just the vast contributions he’s literally made to humanity while also still going like, isn’t it fascinating that literally the richest man in the world who shoots rocket towards Mars, it hasn’t quite yet, but shooting towards Mars transformed automotive industry entirely is also the shit poster on Twitter. Jesus reality. What a show.

Kimberly (19:18): Okay, so you brought up Twitter, David, and this is actually not a listener question, it’s a Kimberly question. I noticed while you were out of the country for a few weeks, you were not on Twitter. How did that go for you?

David (19:30): It was great. And this goes against to the same. Not only can you have mixed emotions, a tension around people and individuals, you can also have it about technology and social media and so on. In many ways, I really love Twitter and I see so much good in it and in just as many ways I see all the ways where it’s literally the worst thing ever. And being off Twitter was just a really healthy break. And it’s interesting because, so I spent, I dunno, two months where I didn’t post or something. And then what I did when I came home was I had picked up a different phone. I had gone to a smaller Samsung, so I was using that Samsung S 24 plus. And I like it a lot. It’s a really great phone, but ah, I want something smaller. So I got the regular 24 and on the regular 24, I didn’t install Twitter.

(20:20): I also didn’t install Instagram and I also didn’t install what’s the last, TikTok. So I had my main phone that didn’t have those apps. And in the past that hasn’t worked when I only had one phone because eventually I would just get too fucking curious and I’d just install it again and it’d be there. And ah, now I’m on in, right? I was able to leave those programs off my main phone because I still kept that old bigger phone. So I have those applications on my own bigger phone and I leave that old bigger phone on the couch in the living room. It’s not with me when I go to eat lunch, it’s not with me in the office, it’s not with me in the bedroom. I still have a phone because texting and controlling smart home things and whatever. But I’ve always able to put it out.

(21:01): And again, I’ve gone through many phases of this, so I will not declare any victory. It’s kind of like a AA meeting. We’re like, oh, I got my chip for the two year thing, but ah shit, I lost it. So I won’t proclaim that. But it’s been really nice. It’s been really nice. And I’ve realized about myself that I’m just as liable to temptation to access as anyone about anything. And I realized this about too. So I dunno, oh, I don’t have a can here, but I’ve been drinking Red Bull, right? And I like Red Bull a lot, but I also know that I will overdo it if I have access to too much of it. So I have try to just buy two cans at a time. It’s a very inefficient way to buy something that you consume all the time. But if I only buy two cans and it’s literally like a half an hour round trip for me to buy another two cans, I can only drink two cans because I’m not going to fucking do it.

(21:57): Right? But if I buy four, holy shit, the odds of me drinking all four are very high. And I feel it’s the same thing about these platforms. If I have Twitter within reach on my phone next to my bed when I wake up in the morning, I am too goddamn curious, right? We’re just talking about this show reality, putting out bangers all the time. And Twitter’s the main or fastest way to get sucked into all those bangers, right? So if it’s right there, you end up using it. If it’s not right there, you don’t, and I’ve read more books in just the last few months than I have in a long time because the time isn’t going into the Twitter and it isn’t going into the TikTok. And that’s nice. And again, here’s a way of you could swear off Twitter, you could, I’m going to quit this. I’m going to quit that. I quit Instagram for several years. I’m on there too now. I don’t use it quite as much. Whatever. Can you just do less of it too? Does it have to be, either it’s this or it’s that, or either Twitter’s the best thing ever. It’s the worst thing ever. What if it’s just both? What if it’s literally both the best thing ever and the worst thing ever. And the main thing you should do is individual. Just control your exposure to it.

Kimberly (23:08): Well, we’re going to pause right there and we’ll pick it back up next week. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number or leave us an email at rework@37signals.com and we just might answer your question on an upcoming show.